wouldn't we all of thought after these weeks of double talk and sometimes triple talk out of that state that today's re-election would of gone off as fair and accurate as any election ever? Well I guess that was too much to ask out of the messed up republic of Georgia. As of early morning atleast 3 polling centers have mal-functioning machines and voters were not allowed to vote......"just mark a ballot and put them in that box over there and we will get to them later" they were told by the sheep herders.....yes just do as you are told and we will run this election any old way. Count the ballots, maybe, count the ballots on election day, who the hell knows, store the ballots until the poll watchers have gone home, oh yes we already ran that sting didn't we?
Starting with today's runoffs, I predict there will not be a timely well agreed upon result in any election anytime soon. Those days are gone thanks to the Nov elections. We've got a new paradigm, ladies and gentlemen!
what? that is what the dems have been after with all the games being played behind the state legislatures backs and you act all surprised. Do you really not know how many states pulled this crap in just the last year. And now we cannot have an election day, we cannot count the voted in a timely manner, we cannot be sure of legal votes, and now you are surprised? Congrats you all go exactly what you dreamed of......venezuela
Some body commented the machines aren't working in Pub strong holds
True or not, nobody will believe an election as stated above, if this sort of rumour persists. Comments on many forums don't believe anything about elections from both parties as some think it could become a bidders game of who has the most money to bid for the machines
And dang it all
I just found out we have the same machines
Wonder how long before we doubt our count
A number of yrs ago, I worked as a poll watcher back in the days of paper ballots only and paper was counted immediately after polls closed and doors locked. if you were a poll watcher you had to be inside before doors locked at closing time. Nobody allowed to leave until votes counted and all poll watchers and counting people signed off. In other words everybody inside signed and agreed to vote count, before going home. Then vote telephoned to central counting bldg but numbers were known and ballots arrived later to verify telephone count. Telephone was used to speed up the likely winner out come instead of waiting for ballots to arrive by car several hrs later. Two people per car, one from each party, thus no tampering with ballots
As poll watcher I watched 5 polling districts. I could walk in front, behind any place I wanted, so long as I did not touch or impede
At the end I could pick any one district and ask for a re-count. Poll workers had no idea which district would be re-counted. I did not ask for a register of voters as my polling station was small enough I knew everybody by name and facial recognition, thus knew if they lived within the district..
I thought the process was fair and honest
I have no idea how it works today in Canada
yep, here in America our poll watchers used to be able to do the very same. Nowadays they are told to leave the building. They are not allowed to be in the same room, trying to look thru card board blocking the windows.
so, the Dominion voting machines are out of order in 3 precincts, and voting had to be halted.
Quite frankly, If I was working for Dominion, I would be a bit embarrassed. This is the USA.... shouldn't we expect to have well-functioning equipment on important projects such as this?
Oh... I forgot to mention the most important bit of information about this subject: the machines went out in Republican areas only
LOL !!!!! Pure coincidence, I am sure. LOL !!!!
Gunter said:
"so, the Dominion voting machines are out of order in 3 precincts, and voting had to be halted. "
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fake news...voting didn't have to be halted:
Georgia Election Officials Slap Down Trump Tweet About Voting Machines | U.S. News® | US News
"Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office responded in a statement that although some issues were reported, they did not stop the vote and were resolved by 10 a.m.
'At no point did voting stop as voters continued casting ballots on emergency ballots, in accordance with the procedures set out by Georgia law,' it said."
Larry,
We took a step in this direction 4 years ago but I agree, 2020 blew us into the stratosphere and we’re never coming back down!
Strangly,as somebody that didn’t understand all the intricacies of tallying votes before the 2020 election, I feel more educated for sure and in some cases, like in GA ....MORE confident in the results not less.
It’s actually illogical to assume that fraud will be worse now after this massive new paradigm of distrust has kicked in.
After 9-11, for instance, people were afraid to fly. The reality is that it became the safest time to flyin history BECAUSE of 9-11 and the insane new precautions that were imposed that were not there before.
Similar, insane scrutiny of our elections, I believe makes it MUCH tougher to get away with fraud and we should be MORE confident in the results.
metmike, thank you for clarifying the Georgia issue. I didn't know that voting continued and the problems were resolved.
and I agree with you that the 2024 election will probably run much smoother... thanks to all stink the 2020 election created. Hopefully, the organizers will have learned a lesson
Thread that was for getting live updates on the voting
Georgia election
Georgia voters on Tuesday turned out in massive numbers to decide control of two U.S. Senate seats, and with them majority control of the upper chamber in what became the most expensive statewide political battle ever waged in American history.
The results delivered the political equivalent of an inside straight, as the Rev. Raphael Warnock (D) became only the second Black man to win a Senate seat in a Southern state since Reconstruction, and his fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff appearing poised to become the first member of the Millennial generation to win election to the Senate.
Here are eight takeaways from last night’s results:
Black voters delivered the Senate
When President-elect Joe Biden gives his inaugural address later this month, he might acknowledge that his vice president, Kamala Harris, will preside over a Senate majority made possible by Black voters.
From the moment Ossoff forced Sen. David Perdue (R) into a runoff in November’s elections, Democrats knew they had to deliver Black voters to the polls in record numbers if they were to have any chance of bucking an historical trend of Republicans winning runoff elections.
They succeeded — in record numbers. Once the final votes are counted, it is likely that more Black voters will have cast a ballot in the runoff election than in any other statewide contest in the history of the United States, with the lone exception of the November election that handed Biden the state’s electoral votes.
The support of a leading Black elected official, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), put Biden on the path to the Democratic nomination for president. High turnout of Black voters elected him in November. Even higher turnout of Black voters gave him a Democratic Senate to work with. They are the core of the Democratic base.
Mobilization matters
The four campaigns and their outside allies spent more than $830 million, much of it on television advertising. But perhaps the most important money spent over the last two months was on unprecedented field programs aimed at mobilizing voters who might otherwise have stayed home.
Republicans mounted what may be the single largest field program in their history. One top Republican source said last week the party had more than 1,000 staffers on the ground working to get voters to the polls.
Democrats doubled that figure — and then some. Ossoff’s campaign alone hired 2,000 organizers, mostly young Black men, the campaign said. The campaign made a million phone calls on Saturday to voters who had not yet voted early or returned their absentee ballots. Then on Monday, they made 1.5 million calls. A coalition of outside groups knocked on 12 million doors in the last seven weeks, according to a source who oversaw that side of the field program.
The Democratic turnout targets extended to younger voters and a not-insubstantial Asian American community that lives in Georgia. They spent money running advertising on platforms like Snapchat, and they built a substantial following on TikTok. And their voters showed up — Ossoff received 93 percent of the total vote he earned in November, while Perdue won 89 percent of his November total.
Warnock’s margin is tougher to compare to his November result, given the all-party primary he and Loeffler won to advance to the runoff — but Warnock had the coattails that delivered Ossoff’s win. Warnock received 2.23 million votes on Tuesday, with some mail-in ballots left to count, running about 19,000 votes ahead of his soon-to-be seatmate.
Trump was the elephant in the room
President Trump’s two visits to Georgia went just about as badly as Republican strategists feared.
He spent more time talking about his own electoral loss and the debunked conspiracy theories floating on the fringes of the internet than he did about Perdue and Loeffler. He was present in the minds of voters in a state he had just lost, and he helped undermine confidence in the elections that Perdue and Loeffler would need to win.
In the closing days of the race, both Perdue and Loeffler spent as much time deflecting questions about Trump’s defeat and the Electoral College votes to be counted Wednesday as they did addressing their constituents.
“He got in the way of any real conversation that Republicans wanted to have with Georgia voters,” one top Democratic strategist crowed Wednesday morning.
Republicans should have learned from Jack Bogle
The late investor Jack Bogle revolutionized the average American’s relationship with the stock market. Bogle, who founded The Vanguard Group, preached a kind of passive investing in which customers would buy slices of the entire market, rather than try to pick the individual stocks that would outperform the market.
Loeffler and Perdue, two of the wealthiest members of the Senate, should have followed his advice. Instead, Perdue and Loeffler’s husband, who heads the New York Stock Exchange, made a series of very active trades early in 2020, after an all-Senate briefing on an emerging pathogen coming from Wuhan, China.
Neither Perdue nor Loeffler were charged with wrongdoing, but the Democratic advertisements wrote themselves: The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 11,000 Georgians and left hundreds of thousands more out of work, but Perdue and Loeffler were busy making money off the stock market.
If incumbent senators learn anything from Georgia, they might want to stick with an extremely passive investing strategy while in office.
Republicans have a suburban problem
Democrats reclaimed control of the House in 2018 on the strength of their appeal to suburban voters — including in suburban Atlanta, where Rep. Lucy McBath (D) picked up a Republican-held seat. Two years later, another suburban Atlanta district elected Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D), a rare bright spot in an otherwise crummy year for House Democrats.
Republicans blamed President Trump and his lousy approval ratings among those voters. Without him on the ballot, cautious suburbanites would be willing to vote for divided government and preserve a Republican Senate.
That’s not the way it worked out. Ossoff won a greater share of the vote in the collar counties around Atlanta on Tuesday than he did in November — and Warnock did even better than Ossoff.
The conventional wisdom is that the suburban vote can be rented, but it cannot be bought. Some Republican sources on Tuesday morning fear that Democrats may have just signed a long-term lease.
Republicans have a base problem
At times over the last four years, Republican strategists have marveled at President Trump’s hold on a substantial segment of the GOP base. That has worked to their advantage in 2016, when they won the White House, and to a lesser degree in 2020, when they won back seats in the House.
But Trump’s continued hold on the party has been a bandaid covering a deeper wound: The Trumpiest voters are not necessarily Republican. They see Washington Republicans as swamp creatures just as much as they see Democrats as swamp creatures.
The zeal with which Trump’s biggest fans have attacked standard conservatives in Washington who have the audacity to acknowledge they cannot overturn a free and fair democratic election, the cheers they gave Trump when he promised to work to defeat Georgia Gov. Kemp and the polls that show more than half of Republican voters feel more aligned with President Trump than with the Grand Old Party all show the long-term challenge Republicans will have in fashioning a post-Trump coalition.
In a speech to a rally in Washington Wednesday morning, Donald Trump Jr. put it most succinctly when he addressed the Republican members of Congress who will vote to certify Biden’s victory: “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”
Trump at the top of the ticket was a blessing and a curse. His absence from a party that increasingly relies on voters who have only turned out in recent years because of him could become simply a curse.
The future of the runoff is in jeopardy
Georgia is one of a handful of states that require a runoff election if no candidate hits a certain threshold in a general election. All but two of the ten states that require runoffs are in the South, and most of those laws have roots in the white backlash against Reconstruction or the Civil Rights Era.
Georgia created its runoff system in the 1960s, after the Supreme Court ruled against an antiquated system that gave rural — and mostly white — counties a disproportionate amount of power to decide gubernatorial elections.
Without the runoff rule, David Perdue would have already taken his oath of office for a second term; he finished the November general election about 88,000 votes ahead of Ossoff, and just 13,603 votes shy of the 50 percent he would have needed to avoid a runoff.
Republicans control Georgia’s state legislature and the governorship. Expect them to consider revising their runoff rules, or doing away with it altogether.
Time to rethink 2022
As Democrats digested election results in November, a grim melancholy set in: The party had not taken full advantage of their opportunities to reclaim the Senate, build their majorities in the House, and win back state legislatures across the country. And the 2022 midterm elections were going to be brutal.
History says a president’s first midterm is rough on his party. But there are exceptions, especially after moments of national unity. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats gained House seats in 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression. George W. Bush’s Republicans picked up seats in 2002, after the September 11th attacks.
Biden will preside over the rollout of a coronavirus vaccine and an economic rebound, likely buoyed by $2,000 checks sent to struggling Americans and billions more to state and local governments.
At the same time, the Republican Party’s soul-searching threatens a brutal primary season rife with an all-out war between Trump backers, ideological hardliners and the more traditional country club, Chamber of Commerce Republicans who may have already abandoned the party in the age of Trump.
The conventional wisdom holds that the midterms will be rough for Democrats. But conventional wisdom also argued against a Black man winning a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia.
But conventional wisdom also argued against a Black man winning a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia.
I think this sentence tells you all you need to know about the author.
Fact is, the republican base was not motivated, the dems base was. Whole districts that Trump carried in the general barely showed up.